7 Humiliating Backpedals from Publishers Over Terrible Ideas
HTML-код
- Опубликовано: 18 сен 2024
- Whoops! These companies immediately hit reverse after everyone got mad about their rubbish ideas...
---
Official Merch Store! store.outsidex...
If you like what we do, you can support us by joining the OX Supporters Club. It's totally optional but it helps us make more of the stuff you love: / oxclub
Outside Xtra is a companion channel to Outside Xbox, covering the wider world of gaming with weekly list videos, Let's Plays and game chats!
Thanks for watching and be excellent to each other in the comments.
Find us at www.outsidextra...
Subscribe to us at / outsidextra
Follow us on Twitter at / outsidextra
Follow us on Instagram: / outsidextra
Like us on Facebook at / outsidextra
A "fun" sequel to this could be 7 (or 122) times publishers doubled down on their terrible ideas after the backlash.
"Don't you guys have phones?" Is one that comes to mind
You could make it a long form video called “101 ways companies destroyed player morale and then somehow made it even worst”
@@Ahrpigi is it terrible decision if Diablo Immortal ended up being profitable as fuck? Sure, there was public backlash but Blizzard ignored it and got money out of it. Looks like a fat W for corpos to me.
@@exploertm8738 profitable doesn't make it not a bad idea, kinda like landlords, over reliance on fossil fuels, and tax cuts for megacorps and billionaires.
@@exploertm8738 Yes it is still a terrible decision.
It isn't quite the same because it didn't involve an actual backpedal, but my favorite recent "white text on a black background apology" was when the Gollum game's publisher got a chatbot to write their apology and it had the wrong name for the game in the text, calling it "The Lord of Ring: Gollum"
It's also very funny because the apology is essentially for the game being shit.
I mean, there is one ring, right? Not like there are others?
@@sacrificiallamb4568 It turns out that three were given to the elves (immortal, wisest, and fairest of all beings), seven to the dwarf lords (great miners and craftsmen of the mountain halls), and nine (nine!) were gifted to the race of men (who above all else desire power). So a bit more than just the one.
@@GibusWearingMann Don't forget the many, many minor rings that elvish smiths all over made too!
@@GibusWearingMann No no, you forget, for they were all of them deceived, for another ring was made. Deep in the land of Mordor, in the fires of Mount Doom, the Dark Lord Sauron forged, in secret, a master ring, to control all others. And into this ring he poured all his cruelty, his malice and his will to dominate all life. One ring to rule them all.
"Augment your....preorder?"
That statement itself sounds criminal.
Pre-orders should be illegal for digital games. At least all the ones without at least a week of early play, what's the point of paying more for the same game with a few extra in-game bits I can buy later if I get to play it on the same day everyone else does?
"I'll augment your pre-order!" Yep, sounds like a threat!
Deus Ex Manking Divided actually had 2 embarrasing backpedals. After they got rid of the tiered preorders, turned out that the preorder items could only be used once, as in, in ONE save. If you used them, finished the game and started a new one, or you f'd up your character build and felt like restarting, they would be gone. Why would they do this, you ask? Simple, they put a store in-game where you could buy them again with real money. This, of course, lead to massive backlash and they eventually made it one per save, as it always should have been.
Edit: THEY DID NOT BACKPEDAL THIS.
I don't know why I thought they did. Don't delete your save.
Oh, damn, I had no idea they had patched that. I kept using the trick of keeping a save at the very start of the game to keep the items.
I didn't know they backpedalled this. Thinking it was 1 use ever (I never paid money but I got a bunch free from deus ex go and the other side material things) is a big part of why I never went back to MD after beating the main game. Not even for the dlc which I'd already paid for.
The problem with Helldivers wasn't just a "we're on PC, we hate consoles" (although, thete's a lot of that on PC) but that PSN is not available worldwide. So a lot of people who had their account on those countries couldn't create a PSN account even if they wanted.
And they removed the ability to purchase the game from those countries and still haven't fully restored access to some players
Also the steam store page has never been updated and still states a psn account is required.
I wish they'd dug deeper into the layers of the controversy, though I understand they had to condense it.
Because, as mentioned, PSN wasn't available everywhere. Thus, a large chunk of people who had already bought the game and been playing for months would have lost access simply because they couldn't sign into PSN. And thus, it wasn't just review bombing. Several people boycotted playing. Plus there were demands for refunds to the point that Steam and Sony butted heads over the entire issue.
The community had a rallying cry of "We dive together or not at all."
@@TheTaurenification Yeah, it's a weird situation. I get Sony's decision from certain business perspectives since it made things a lot easier for them to monitor the game against hackers, bots, etc. (TF2 controversy anyone?,) but, at the same time, they really should have looked more into what this would mean for people in countries where the PSN isn't allowed and/or considered alternatives so this wouldn't become absolute pr nightmare in case things went wrong (which it obviously did.)
@@TheTaurenification "not available everywhere "meaning it is available in 73 out of 195 countries worldwide (Edit:going by the UN classification).
I love when they announce the terrible idea as if it's them doing us a massive favour and something they're super excited for.
"I can't wait to tell you guys about the freedom and convenience that you'll have from the new system where you pay every time you use the jump button. It'll just make everything so much better and clearer and simpler!"
"This is, of course, to help the gamers make their controllers last longer by making them push less buttons and find new and creative solutions to gain altitude."
Former EA guy who was responsible for the whole Unity debacle once went on record saying it would be a good idea to charge people to reload their weapons in the middle of a firefight in multiplayer. With not a single shred of self awareness or irony.
"That's simply incredible!" - Apple's Tim Cook, as seen on many SAMTIME videos
Que jump-less speed runs.
@@Crocogatorhe had awareness. Just not about what a terrible human being he actually is.
The worst packpedals are the ones where the company doesn't give you the apology, but sells you the apology.
Thanks to No Man’s Sky, it’s now the entire industry that plays that long con
@@MegaZeta Hey now, NMS has long redeemed itself while proving to be a surprisingly long lasting purchase that doesn't force you to buy things for some kind of extended experience.
As much as it sets a precedent for such habits, I wish more follow through at least and work on fixing their janky hyped shit
@@MegaZeta I haven't heard of many other games that launched horribly and ended up becoming good, Cyperpunk 2077 and FFXIV (I'm not counting FO76), with all other games they hang on for a few months at most and then abandon it, even if it's an easier fix than those, like Anthem was.
Man, I'm surprised Overwatch 2 wasn't put on this. First they tried restricting new heroes to the battlepass, now new heroes are free as soon as they come out. Just another wonderful Blizzard Idea
Did you not see all the mentions of Overwatch in the Diablo entry?
That wasn't so much a "oops let us actively step that back and issue an apology", it was more them just stopping to do that in the future after doing it multiple times over several months.
yeah but i don't think they regretted that decision or reverted it due to backlash - i think they knew it'd hurt their longevity to continue to lock the hero behind a paywall. they want the longest flow of income
The problem is probably partly that they have many more bad decisions for the game that they haven't backpedaled on.
The worst mistake was making Overwatch 2 entirely redundant and pointless. People downloaded it hoping for the PvE single player campaign. They eventually admitted they just dropped it, changed it to 5v5, and you have to suck it.
"We still wanna go forward and give you, the gamers, the most flexible, most powerful system we can, and game the way YOU wanna game, with the games you wanna game with... and the people you wanna play with."
Possibly the cringiest, most awkward, out-of-touch, "this sentence was developed via committee" game industry quote I've ever heard.
"How often can we fit the word 'game' into this one sentence?"
This is my problem with E3 and other gaming conventions. Speeches filled with just uplifting jargon and pointless freedom statements. How many times did he say "powerful"? When just describing sitting down in your pants playing CoD.
I love it when pr implying the game's lack of focus and depth is somehow in my interest because I can experience it however I want to. Like not doing their job and DESIGNING a gameplay for me to experience beyond "point at da bad guy shoot at da bad guy crouch in grass where are-a tou" is somehow a favor to me. It's like being a mexican and hearing about how great mc's fries are because they have no spice and seeing everywhere starting to sell fries with salt, sugar and msg.
Worth reminding people that while Helldivers 2 no longer "needs" a PSN login, it's still no longer available, or playable, in over 100 countries that don't have PSN. Even if they previously had access before hand.
Who cares? There is no matchmaking filter so have fun with a filipino who ignores the team lol
@@ghostface5559 A lot of people care.
@@ghostface5559 The people living in the blocked countries who bought the game definitely care
@ghostface5559 the people that don't have a PS5, that bought a game on PC, that were not informed they needed the PSN account on PC, that lost access to the game because Sony does not allow accounts to be created in the previously listed over 100 countries, that have paid for this game and still cannot play it to this day.
Feels like a lot of people should, and do, care. Just because you're apathetic towards your gaming brethren being screwed over doesn't mean we should agree with you.
@@KahranRamsus 99% of the people who review bombed it don't care anymore, they're too busy patting themselves on the back
The developers of Destiny went back and forth like, well, a Bungie cord...
I see what you did there….well played
What do you get when you cross an owl with a bungee cord?
Yeah, I feel this. Think the cords snapped for me which is a real shame.
I wouldn’t pay for an NFT, but I would pay for the original horse drawing with an autograph.
Ngl, same
The really egregious thing about Diablo 3's auction house was that Blizzard took a 25% cut from every transaction. So if you tried to dump some gear you couldn't use to buy stuff you needed, you effectively lost 25% of the sale value or add more real world cash to make up the difference.
I vaguely remember that when members of the military who are often in places where they can't be "always online" for DRM purposes noted that to Microsoft, the response was "buy a PlayStation." So they did.
My dad’s a veteran and he still plays on PlayStation
Or get a proper job?
actually, don mattrick said "we have an offline xbox, it's called the xbox 360".
@@VelvetMetrolink Huh? Did you reply to the wrong comment or something?
@VelvetMetrolink so government work isn't a real job?
I've supported this channel for years. You've given us free content all this time but now you've got a fancy wall it's all broken promises. 115 of them all at once. 💔
"PREPARE THE WHITE-ON-BLACK APOLOGY STATEMENT!"
🎺🎺🎺🎺🎺
If studios have gotten good at doing anything it's the white text on black backgrounding thing. Just that.
Of course you should feel even more insulted because they don't even have the decency to use different font.
I'll take "Things both video game publishers and the American Republican Party say" for $400, Alex!
Oh, sorry, I forgot for a moment that Republicans never ever apologize for their racism, they just double down and lie some more when called out.
Yep I had honestly never clocked they always do this white on black. This was a revelation tbh and the best/worst hallmark...
i hope they keep using the way he said that, every once in a while.
@@chilomine839 Time to bring back text adventure games!
The most galling thing about entertainment companies' myriad apologies nowadays is that they always phrase them in annoying corporate positivespeak.
They'll never just outright say "we did something you didn't like, sorry" it's always "we're moving forward in an exciting new direction towards [the thing everyone expected at bare minimum to begin with]"
Really? you left out one of the biggest, EA's Battlefront 2 and their amazing: "The intent is to provide players with a sense of pride and accomplishment..."
I think they've used that one already
Supprise mechanics
I've got that T-Shirt!
Ah, I remember that one well. Literally the most downvoted comment in Reddit history.
To be fair, that's lowhanging fruit to the point of digging it out of the ground lol
As to helldivers, they removed the pcn requirement yes but that requirement came with a block in 140+ countires which they have not removed. But community ignores that because it doesnt affect them and only affects the "poors".
Yup. Bonus points, those countries would have been able to play even with PSN.
They would have marked another region like they had been doing for over a decade. Heck, customer support used to even quiety suggest it. But now, Sony games are unlisted entirely for them. Well done, Helldivers community.
I'll be complaining about the 115 missing entries and them praise you guys like you're gods when you release 7 more for the commenter's edition.
And one of their entries will be this video
That 122 apology was gorgeous.
Don't you guys have phones? But we want the car owning experience to be like real life, that'll be £100 please. Hey who wants to unlock Darth Vader for premium coinage? You need a PSPlus account to to dive into Hell.
We wanted to give players a sense of pride and accomplishment.
I feel like the Helldivers one is *particularly* big because like.
Helldivers was everywhere beforehand. Jokes floated through every fandom, fanart was being done by everyone, Warbond titles would hit the trending, you name it and it was happening.
In the post-fuckup world? Not a peep. Nothing. Sony took a shotgun, blew off the leg of a legit cash cow, and it's left having to hobble in the shadow of God of War et al that Sony slapped on the Steam storefront...all with 'Requires PSN accounts' still, mind, so they didn't actually learn their lesson. They just wanted people to forget about it so they could go back to making $$$ so they bent the knee *once*
My guess is Sony (whose products I try to avoid) saw Microsoft pull that stunt with the Halo games and copied it. Forgetting that most of us who use Windows have MS logins whether we want them or not. Dumb, but since when did multi-national corporations with too many fingers in too many rich pies not defy common decency and good sense?
You should collect 115 more backpedals from the comments and sell them to us as community content.
I was promised 122 backpedals!
Its kinda amazing after so many cases like these failing miserably, greedy CEOs still think they'll be the exception
They are entirely detached from reality tbf, a Sony CEO recently told the staff they fired to "Take a year off at the beach" instead of being angry.
“90% of studios shut down their shitty live service games right before they make Fortnite money” -execs
As I recall with the xbox drm fiasco, it wasn't player backlash that made them change, it was playstation's big reveal with the bold print bullet point "we don't care what you do with your games, no DRM." Then, like a week later, xbox backpeddled as they got their asses handed to them.
I remember seeing that notice from sony/playstation. It was pretty funny. Microsoft got smacked back down.
Sadly, that only applies to Xbox One. The Online requirement is now enforced on the Xbox Series consoles.
If you have a disc that actually contains the entire game, like the 2019 reprints of Spyro Reignited Trilogy that contains the Accessibility Patch on the disc, you can install it on the Xbox One even if you have no internet. But on Xbox Series, the system will throw the License Error message if you attempt to install it without internet.
IIRC, there was a whole 10-20 min video from the Xbox One announcement con describing how to lend/sell games to your friends. 13:48 is a clip from the hysterical PlayStation response ad campaign “How to lend your PS4 games to your friends”
@@xenolinguist"Never interrupt you opponent when they are making a mistake. Capitalize on it and clown all over their faces instead."
The Helldivers thing was an improvement but there are still over a hundred countries that aren't allowed to play even on Steam... I've forgiven Arrowhead, but certainly not their overlords.
16:50 so long as none of those dlcs have Mike-rotransactions
mike rowe-transactions?
Haha. Noice
@@soulreapermagnumEvery purchase the former host of Dirty Jobs is a Mike Rowe transaction.
All right, that's 7 backpedals. Where are the other 115?
They're going to sell it to us as DLC for $9.99 per backpedal.
They are resisting.
I’m going to form a complaint 😤
They're trying to distract us with additional videos on different subjects it seems
@@hannahmae676 Demand the other 115! XD
1:43 perfect timing for that joke, I just had a tooth removed yesterday 😂
hope you're not in too much pain and you heal up soon. Had root canal on Monday.
@TsiolkovskySportingLocks I'm doing alright, thanks! Mouth is super sore but I'm getting there. Hope your recovery is going alright, I've heard root canal treatment is horrible
I love the response to the Xbox One DRM. "We already have a console for offline, it's called the Xbox 360". It's shocking how little people have learned from that embarrassing fumble.
What I remember most about the XBox One fiasco is how long it took Microsoft to finally fess up and back down--and how insultingly cavalier they were before they did.
They screwed over all the good will they had from the 360.
How about the drill fiasco with Payday 2?
Basically, some time ago OVERKILL announced that Payday 2 would be getting a microtransaction system for weapon skins in the form of safes that could drop from missions and drills that you had to pay for to open them. This was DESPITE the fact that, early on in the games' lifespan they had promised no microtransactions would ever come to the game.
Eventually due to backlash they half-reversed their decision, in that from that point forward safes would still drop from missions, but you no longer needed to buy drills to open them. Later on, they removed the safes entirely, and now you just get the weapon skins directly from mission loot drops.
I know its not a game company in the sense their costumers are developers instead of players, but I thought Unity runtime fee for developers should be here as well.
That one was a special kind of stupid.
What's worse is the potential price increases for Indies that use Unity. Yooka-Laylee was originally $40, but Playtonic Games would definitely charge $70 for Yooka-Replaylee just to offset the Unity Runtime fees.
“122”?! Pffft!! That’s not even a number divisible by 7!
I just knew Microsofts always online was going to be on this list. You could call it an XBOX 180
_The Culling_ was a Matryoshka doll of backpedalling. They constantly changed the gameplay, making it objectively worse each time, only to rugpull their whole (remaining) player base with suddenly releasing a sequel. Queue a LONG line of backpedals, which included cancelling and refunding that sequel, making an "Origins" version of the original to make it play more like its beloved initial release, and ultimately pulling the plug on everything when they realized the camel's back had already been broken long ago and no amount of removing straw would remedy that.
Also, to get a little industry-meta, see development language _Unity_ and its very recent very bad ideas.
6:12 you guys misreported. They didn’t backpeddle, infact, Sony doubled down and the next few PlayStation releases have not released in those 160+ counties, and helldivers players in those counties who already purchased now unable to play with no refund. A huge heel dig in if you ask me, not a backpeddle
yeah its a shame how they weasled out of that despite not walking it back at all, was super excited for helldivers cause i played the original but when this all went down and we saw that nothing actually changed from the backlash i went back to old games again
They did back pedal the requirement, and they're not selling it in areas where people could previously buy but not legally play it. That's still an improvement, if not the best possible one
I believe it was Yahtzee who said it best:
"Let's all laugh at an industry that never learns anything, tee hee hee."
I literally went back when Ellen said 122 to make sure I heard it right only to be met with the realization that I was, in fact, in the middle of a joke. Well played.
Has everyone forgotten that Apex Legends gameplay is based on Titanfall?! And the Helldivers 2 incident didn't stop Sony from doing the same damn thing to Ghost of Tsushima, leading to it being locked out to the same countries that Helldivers 2 was going to be.
Anyone remembers the state of Ghost Recon Breakpoint during the first year? Until they basically rebuilt the game in a way everyone wanted in the first place?
For those who weren't there, Ghost Recon Breakpoint was initially marketed as a hardcore survival game, and then turned out to be a terrible live service looter shooter RPG*.
Needless to say, us Ghost Recon fans were not happy with that bait and switch in the slightest, which led to Ubisoft pushing an update that basically walked back all of those mechanics to make the game slightly resemble the advertisements.
And that was one issue fixed...out of a dozen others.
It still has drones, it’s not fixed.
Then Ubisoft tried to add NFT gear to it.
I'm a single parent to a boy with Kefka's syndrome. The only thing that makes him laugh is watching your videos. Thank you, oxbox, for bringing some joy into his life!
I hope i am not rude, but what is Kefka's syndrome?
@anna.owo. It's a rare, untreatable genetic disorder that only affects 0.01% of children born to parents who played Final Fantasy VI when they were young.
Just a clarification/correction, but for Apex Legends the battle pass wasn't completely reverted back. They still split in 2, meaning there are 2 battle passes for every season. Not only do they cost the same as the original season long one (if you decide on buying it), but it forces "player engagement" to get through them since you have less time to complete each of them.
... Anyone who has ever heard the term "sunsetting" never associates it with anything good.
I bet one of the suits heard someone talking about sunsetting Social Security and thought it was a great term to use to get rid of all the old gear people worked hard to get.
"We're sunsetting your armor! That way you can be forced to get the new gear!"
And two, WoW always did that with their gear as well when a new expansion came out.
I somehow have started watching cruise ship videos and they keep calling going to watch the sun set "sunsetting" it throws me every time. 😅
Deus Ex: We didn't ask for this edition..
Shout out to that whole unneeded hullabaloo that the Escape from Tarkov devs forced upon themselves earlier this year with the "Unheard Edition" controversy.
In which they tried to backtrack on their previous promise that buyers of the older "Edge of Darkness" edition for $150 would get access to All Future DLCs by trying to lock their new PvE mode behind a new $250 paywall that was the Unheard Edition.
It took a few days of the CEO stubbornly refusing to back down and ruining their audience's goodwill in the process before they, begrudgingly, walked it all back.
I didn't even play Escape from Tarkov, and I was offended
Not to mention the whole "women can't handle the pressure" comment when asked if there would be female character models.
The backpedals and apologies seem to be increasing in number each year. It's sad.
0:23 Peter Molyneux! I know that is you wearing an Ellen mask.
HE CANT KEEP GETTING AWAY WITH THIS !
The thing I love about the Helldivers 2 situation is that Sony looked at the game comprised of a playerbase who loved the in-game concept of rallying together to demolish the daunting, faceless forces threatening what they hold dear by any means necessary and thought "yeah we should really poke this bear"
Ahh the Helldivers mess. I remember people designing review bomb pattern capes about it.
While it's technically more of a TTRPG rather than a proper video game, I feel that the various flounderings of Hasbro and Wizards of the Coast deserve a call-out. Dungeons and Dragons is THE quintessential TTRPG, however constant corporate mismanagement has led to near yearly (if not monthly) disasters, including the attempts at repealing the OGL, the attempted integration of AI into DND, various layoffs, the failed attempt at DNDOne (AKA DND 6E, now 5.5), and attempted changes with DND Beyond to scrap any pre-5.5 rules.
They have had to back-peddle so much, that it's remarkable that the brand is still alive. It does make sense however why Larion chose to NOT make Baulders Gate 4 (or any BG3 expansions) after all of their tomfoolery.
Wizards' mishandling of the OGL fiasco nearly gifted Paizo the entire tabletop industry on a silver platter.
Fun fact though! They're looking to find a team to make BG4
@@benn454 Which is especially funny since their first OGL mishandling during the transition to 4e was what drove Paizo to make Pathfinder its own system in the first place.
@@adamzielinski5213 Oh, the owners of DND always get stupid when their stuff gets popular. 2e, 3e, 3.5e, 4e, all of them have had aspects where corporate exects get too excited and end up ruining everything.
What's truly tragic is that I know many people who were still excited when the latest PHB came out. Goldfish-like memories, I swear...
Someone needs to tell me why Sony keeps trying to psn us pc players? It’s more insulting than trying to make fetch happen
Best part is the PSN requirement is now on their single player games that don’t have online content. FFS 🤦
They could at least be nice enough to do what Epic Games Store does and lure people in with free games every week to get you to sign up. It seems to have worked, because they're still doing it.
Most likely to datamine PC master race and try to use PSN for game purchases instead of through steam.
So, money reasons.
To ensure that players cannot cheat by any means; If they resort to cheating, their PSN accounts will be banned immediately.
This anti-cheat strategy worked with Gran Turismo Sport, and it's also working on Gran Turismo 7, which is why Sony is doing this on all games on Steam.
My guess would be to add an in game store that doesn't involve Valve taking a cut of the sales.
I feel blaming Respawn and Eidos Montreal is wrong, given these directives almost certainly came from EA and Squeenix.
Agreed. The blame is always on the producer, where it belongs, as they have the money and power. Devs are doing what they're forced to do by their corporate owners
Why not blaming both :D
I vote we get a sequel to this where you guys count down 7 times publishers SHOULD have backpedaled after acting on their terrible ideas.
More like 700.
Well, I for one am looking forward to the 16 or so list videos of 7 entries each that were promised.
On the bright side: the more backpedaling, the more Oxboxtra videos.
They can't keep getting away with it! (They can and will) 😅
Sony walked back on PSN requirements for Helldivers 2, but forced it on all future releases. Ghost of Tsushima, GoW Ragnarok, Lego Horizon are all unplayable and not purchasable in all countries that do not support PSN.
Every AAA publisher marketing dept., “We’ve had a great idea that is NOTHING like any other marketing idea that has faced enormous backlash, and cost AAA publishers real money!” Every AAA publisher CEO, “I trust you implicitly, to make me billions, because, as a CEO I NEVER read the trade press, and every idea I have heard within the last five minutes is. The. Greatest. Idea. Ever!!!”
No mention of Cyberpunk's terrible launch and the backpedalling on it being "totally playable" on old-gen consoles ? But the apology letter was on a yellow background ! Yellow !
That's how you know they were really sorry, after having sold millions of preorders to -stupid- -gullible- optimistic customers.
The Xbox One reveal always reminds me of the Sega Saturn reveal. A reveal so bad that Sony walked on staged, announced a way lower cost, dropped the mic and walked off stage.
The funniest apologys are when they put in an update that's clearly a business decision to rip us off, but then they'll claim it was an 'unintentional bug' lol
You guys missed a big part of the Helldivers 2 fiasco. They didn't roll back the PSN requirement, they just made the game un-purchaseable in countries where PSN is not accessible. Somewhere around 180 countries. Excellent business decision by Sony, the guys who hate players and money.
Guys like these comments so they can update the video
They did both roll back the requirement and delisted the game in territories without psn
_Either nobody told Microsoft in 2013..._
Microsoft has been doing evil shit since before Windows 3.0 (That's before Windows 95). Always expect Microsoft to intentionally and maliciously mess things up. Always.
It took bungie a while to unsunset guns, by then a fiend named 'Datto' had tricked many people into deleting these old guns.
Ubisoft's short lived NFT scams.
Hahahahahahahahahaha the "You've already watched them? Watch'em again" at the end, was gold hahahahahaha
That's not an NFT! It actually physically exists! Poor Mike got confused again...
Dunno if you’ll count this but, for a potential Commenter’s Edition, you should mention the time Epic accidentally brought back a Fortnite Season exclusive skin, The Paradigm, on August 7th. They said they’d remove her from player’s locker and grant refunds to those her bought her on that day, but the backlash on this decision was so loud that they not only let player’s keep her and still gave them their V-Bucks back but also announced the end of Battle Pass exclusivity altogether for future Seasons
I worked on the Xbox team at Microsoft through the Xbox One launch. It was an absolute s***show that every engineer saw coming years ahead of time. That's what happens when a games company is run by Steve "Srpotsman" Balmer and Don "Business Bro" Mattrick.
Judging what the Xbox community has been saying about Phil Spencer, it sounds like those two did maintain a strong competitive spirit that made collaborations with their competitors impossible. If they stayed:
1. Crossplay on Minecraft wouldn't have happened, and may not exist in general.
2. Both Banjo and Steve wouldn't appear in Super Smash Bros. Ultimate, and both Crash and Spyro wouldn't make cameos in Astro Bot. Who would've replaced them all is anyone's guess.
3. All of the Rare developed games wouldn't appear on Nintendo Switch Online, with Goldeneye's rerelease on Xbox prevented by Nintendo yet again.
4. While Xbox games would still be released on PC, they wouldn't be on Steam and instead available from the Windows store. And even if they did, they would be playable only on Windows (sorry, Steam Deck owners) and require a Microsoft account to access the Windows store as a launcher.
5. Xbox titles would also remain exclusive to Xbox and not available on Playstation or Nintendo hardware. Those that were released on those systems before their corresponding publishers/developers were acquired by Microsoft would be removed from store shelves and delisted on Playstation Store and Nintendo eShop.
I appreciate you guys making one of the only correct references to the Diablo 3 auction house episode. Almost all games' media has swallowed Blizzard's face saving horse shit about how, "THEY thought it over and realized it was leading to an unbalanced and less enjoyable experience for many players." Not the reality that the entire freaking player base had bitched at them since it was announced during development and after the game was released it was confirmed that they had very obviously nerfed drop rates compared to Diablo 2 to force players who wanted to play the higher difficulties to upgrade through the real money auction house, no Blizzard tried to pretend that they had thought about this themselves and were wisely changing it, just to make it better for players even though it would reduce their chance to get some extra money. It always makes me so freaking mad when so many, lesser groups (like Game Informer or those fucking idiots at WhatCulture) list that as a change made by the developer to make the game better, as opposed to them finally listening to their fans and fixing an obvious flaw they had intentionally put into the game to try to extort some extra money.
I like the new keeping it real direction of the channel calling out the bs
I remember SimCity 2013. EA designed the game around the concept of Always Online, even when playing single and said it was a core design and couldn't be patched. Fast forward a disastrous launch and magic: they patched the game so it wasn't to late! But the game was already dead by then. Sadge
It's indicative that Sony should release 64 new live-service games, of course! At least that's what executives would probably conclude after seeing how live services are so popular and always in the zeitgeist.
12:32 that insistent facial expression is priceless and perfect
There's a mountain of people who can no longer play Helldivers 2, EVEN NOW after the backpedaling, because of changes in distribution in their countries as a result of the terrible decisions.
Even now I struggle to want to play again, I still feel so betrayed by their choices.
Kinda surprised they didn't mention the bright engram thing that happened for players that were maxed on level a while back where they throttled exp gain, got called out, basically saying we're sorry, it'll be fixed, and then changing it so players earned earned the amount it said but then making it so each free engram now require a lot more exp. Got called out again and basically said this system isn't working the way we want it to.
Blizzard usually does "apologize" but only after telling you for months and years that they're right
Anyone else remember when Valve tried to set up paid mods? The idea was that any player could create a new piece of content for a game, list it, and they could profit off of it. One of the many issues was ownership rights. If the mod I listed requires framework from another mod, shouldn't they be getting a cut as well?
After a fun few days, Valve scrapped the entire thing. Bethesda took notes, and found a way to add a curated mod store within their own games later.
that intro was too meta and actually made me cackle! 🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣
you forgot the bit where Helldivers 2 got region locked in all the regions where you COULDNT have a PSN account and still is to this day.
At this point, Bugthesda could fill 2 entire episodes to themselves.
one of the biggest back peddles was the first introduction to Bethesdas paid mods (anyone remember that?) it was such a... storm that it tore the community apart in a complete community breakdown due to split opinions by modders and mod users, you know Skyrim that small game that a hand full of people of heard of, yeah maybe don't completely shaft an already working design that's been the pillar of your ratings for 10's of years
Speaking someone with a game dev degree, 7:13 stung a wee bit 😢
Fascinating how most of these examples are for live service games. I wonder if that’s indicative of something.
"To err is human."
It's "air" right?
Ah well, to err is human, I suppose!
16:18 What Mr Mike - a bastion of hard-hitting journalism in this #7 entry especially - fails to mention is that the one race that actually rewarded us properly (Tokyo) was hit with the nerf-hammer so hard it beggared belief. Also, whilst a 1m cr might sound like LOADS, 90% of the rarer cars are 20m cr purchases. So Polyphony not only saw that people were upset with their gimped economy, but they also noted the ways in which the community was playing it how they used to in GTs 1-6 (grindy grind) and deliberately targeted the one race people ran. Because FUTW.
These attempts are just a) market research to see what companies can get away with and b) slow attempts to normalize unethical business practices. i.e. the companies knew they'd get pushback, but in a long game sense they'd wear people down until their practices were just normal.
6:40
"PREPARE THE WHITE ONBLACK APOLOGY STATEMENT!!!!"
* royal fanfare plays *
Superb comedy LOL
That Xbox One reveal montage will never get old. "...for Call of Duty!" takes me out every single time.
I only really play single-player games and that entire Apex Legends section made absolutely no sense to me. I feel like someone just explained Fermat's last theorem backwards, in Czech, through the medium of frog intestines.
I think I'm glad I don't do online gaming.
Oxtra providing their very own white on black apology for their cock up, pure cinema.
Ah yes, "sunsetting", what a positive spin on "planned obsolescence".
We also got a lovely cape from Helldivers 2, that showed a very lovely design that was pretty much the chart of good to bad reviews Helldivers got after that announcement.
And remember that time that the rebooted Star Wars Battlefront 2 was filled with microtransactions? And got so much backlash that they made the entire thing for free?
while not an apology a backpedal that should be in one of these is concord. they backpedaled so hard they deleted the game from peoples accounts and gave everyone their money back before 2 weeks passed.
The worst part of the Helldivers thing is they didn't roll back taking the game away from a bunch of countries where PSN is blocked...
I'm surprised you didn't mention Kinect. Microsoft were dead set on that, until they weren't.
The worst part of the Helldiver 2 segment is that PSN isn't even available in half the planet and Steam blocked said countries from being able to play the game in preparation for the PSN integration. Said block is still in place to this day.
Oh i love these types of videos. The sarcasm. The pointing out of game companies mistakes. The playerbase coming together. Its so good to see. And funny and entertaining too 😁
I was so busy laughing at Mike's pitch-perfect retro game t-shirt + blazer outfit, I completely missed that his description in the lower-third graphic was "man in game t-shirt and blazer". Brilliant.
Deus Ex: Mankind Divided Augment was by far the most baffling. They couldn't even explain it well enough to know why it sucked so bad. My reaction when it first came out was "Is the marketing team on drugs?" I didn't even see how this could possibly make them any more money(unlike the other blatant scams you pointed out in this video). It was just...WTF?!